Group items tagged

"The Internet is a gullible place. Before you know it, you buy into a YouTube video, and you're sharing Facebook posts and tweets with misinformation. If you haven't done so yourself, you likely know someone who has. Some of the most viral stories of the year have turned out to be fakes. Remember when Will and Monifa Sims captured our hearts in May while singing karaoke at a gas station? They were actors. And who could forget the hilarious twerking girl on fire? Simply a stunt orchestrated by Jimmy Kimmel. Not all hoaxes were videos, though. The Internet followed along with Elan Gale, a producer for The Bachelor, who live-tweeted a fake situation he claimed to experience on an airplane; an adorable kid's letter to Santa was actually the brainchild of a comedian. For a full look at the top social media hoaxes you fell for this year, check out the gallery above."

"The term "fake news" is problematic for a number of reasons, one of which is that it is widely used to mean anything from "outright hoax" to "some information I do not like." Therefore, I refrain from using the term to describe media sources at all. Besides that, I refrain from discussing the term because I submit that the biggest problem in our current media landscape is not "hoax" stories that could legitimately be called "fake news." What is far more damaging to our civic discourse are articles and stories that are mostly, or even completely, based on the truth, but which are of poor quality for other reasons. This post is the first in a series I plan to do in which I visually rank one or more recent articles on my chart and provide an in-depth analysis of why each particular article is ranked in that spot.  My analysis includes discussions of the headlines, graphics, other visual elements, and the article itself. I analyze each element and each sentence by asking "what is this element/sentence doing?""

"Warning! Please read, this is real," she tweeted. "There is a thing called 'Momo' that's instructing kids to kill themselves," the attached screenshot of a Facebook post reads. "INFORM EVERYONE YOU CAN." Maximoff's plea has been retweeted more than 22,000 times, and the screenshot, featuring the creepy face of "Momo," has spread like wildfire across the internet. Local news hopped on the story Wednesday, amplifying it to millions of terrified parents. Kim Kardashian even posted a warning about the so-called Momo challenge to her 129 million Instagram followers. To any concerned parents reading this: Do not worry. The "Momo challenge" is a recurring viral hoax that has been perpetuated by local news stations and scared parents around the world. This entire cycle of shock, terror, and outrage about Momo even took place before, less than a year ago: Last summer, local news outlets across the country reported that the Momo challenge was spreading among teens via WhatsApp. Previously, rumors about the challenge spread throughout Latin America and Spanish-speaking countries."

"Initially there were only a few viral hoaxes. Now, with the immense popularity of social media, they are happening almost daily."

"A study that claimed Fox News viewers were significantly less intelligent than average Americans is a hoax, Michael Giltz writes. The "study" was ordered up by a group of conservatives who hope to move the Republican party in a more moderate direction, lead hoaxer "P. Nichols" told Giltz."

""Haven't you ever wanted to put your foot through your television screen?" asked an actor in "Media Burn," an outdoor spectacle staged in 1975 by the performance art collective Ant Farm. The answer, 15 years later, is a resounding "Yes!" Now, a generation of artists who grew up with television are beginning to rebel against it. Following Ant Farm's lead, they are kicking a hole -- metaphorically, at least -- in the cathode-ray tube. Some of today's most incendiary artists derive the structure, style and subject matter of their art from mass media. Mordantly funny, frighteningly Orwellian and very much a product of the times, their work challenges the image merchants. Moreover, it constitutes a search for truth in the technetronic age, where, increasingly, perception is reality. These artists are "cultural jammers," exposing the ways in which corporate and political interests use the media as a tool of behavior modification. Jamming is CB slang for the illegal practice of electronically interrupting radio broadcasts, conversations between fellow hams or the audio portions of television shows. Cultural jamming, by extension, is artistic "terrorism" directed against the information society in which we live."

"For a look at the sometimes-silly, sometimes-concerning false information that circulates the Internet, The Washington Post offers a weekly roundup on The Intersect, a blog dedicated to digital and Internet culture. Its series called "What was fake on the Internet this week?" can be a resource for teaching news literacy using timely examples that are relevant to an Internet-savvy generation. The most recent blog entry addresses topics such as fake tweets, false reports of a smartphone virus and bogus rumors that the National Rifle Association is banning guns at its annual convention. The Intersect blog also offers commentary on Internet and social media trends, viral content and hoaxes. Here are a few additional websites that debunk misinformation in the news:"

"That Facebook post about a super-secret conspiracy mainstream media doesn't want you to know about? It could soon be accompanied by a link to actual reporting repudiating those claims. Facebook began rolling out a new initiative to debunk fake news Thursday that automatically serves up related links from reliable sources for stories that have been flagged by fact-checkers as potential hoaxes."

"But it wasn't a fluke. That's the problem. In just the past two weeks, the Internet has been told, by sources they trust (and share on Facebook), that a New Jersey waitress was stiffed on tips by an anti-gay family and that Amazon.com was about to launch product-delivering drones. This was just two months after Jimmy Kimmel created a sort of viral ad for his TV show, a video of a "twerk fail" that was reported by multiple TV news channels as real. Or real enough. Hey, it was a video on the Internet! In all three of these cases, readers were pointed to fake stories that were basically PR for successful businesses or-in the New Jersey case-a scam by a waitress whose collegues considered her an inveterate liar. How many news outlets tried to confirm these stories before running them? You don't want to know."